Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Literature; Politics

Project Advisor 1

Thomas Bartscherer

Project Advisor 2

Roger Berkowitz

Abstract/Artist's Statement

On June 7th, 2023, the Joe Biden Administration announced that they would appoint an anti-banned book coordinator for the Department of Education to inform school districts that removing certain books would violate federal civil laws concerning free speech. Biden and his Department of Education have worked tirelessly to find someone to fill this position, yet it still remains vacant as of the time of this draft. Biden may be too busy to fill the position. Or maybe he realized that the term “banned books” is misleading. There are no banned books in the United States. The phenomenon that the Biden administration alludes to is the steep rise in book removals, and school board decisions spurred on by a formal challenge or in response to new state legislation. Tackling the subject as banned books brings on connotations of censorship or more dramatically, an assault on free speech. Framing it as a free speech deters from having a serious discussion about education, but more specifically the literature curriculums and library selections in these schools. For this project, I will examine the misconceptions, assumptions, and false interpretations surrounding the book removal phenomenon. This analysis will start by covering the differences between book bans and book removals grounded in both phenomena’s histories. From there, I will look into two of the most removed books in schools, Gender Queer and Slaughterhouse-Five, and the assumptions surrounding their removals. From there, this analysis will conclude that book removals are a cultural issue that only leads to further partisan division in an already heated-up 2024 election.

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Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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